Through the Years, Courses Reflect Changing Approaches to Environmental Law

When what became Yale Law School’s first environmental clinic launched in 1995, changes to landmark environmental legislation were fresh on people’s minds. The Clean Air Act of 1970 had long established some of the earliest tools available to environmental lawyers. Then in 1990, amendments tightened the law to create a new nationwide strategy to the problem of air pollution.

“There was a sense that we have a framework of law, now we need to implement it,” said Dan Esty ’86, Hillhouse Professor at Yale University with primary appointments in the Law and Environment Schools. “And that was the galvanizing force to launch the clinic.”

That clinic, founded by Esty and later named the Goldman Sonnenfeldt Environmental Protection Clinic, served for more than 30 years as Yale Law School’s home for students looking for firsthand experience in environmental law and policy. As the original clinic winds down, new opportunities for students to gain experience in environmental law are taking hold. The Environmental Justice Law and Advocacy Clinic, led by Clinical Associate Professor of Law Stephanie Safdi ’13, confronts environmental challenges by representing community organizations, tribal nations, nonprofit coalitions, and others. Meanwhile, the Law, Environment & Animals Practicum — launched through the Law, Environment, and Animals Program and led by team members Daina Bray, Laura Fox, and Viveca Morris — will give students opportunities to collaborate with leading environmental and animal protection organizations. In this course, students will work to advance policy and accountability at the intersection of climate change and industrial animal agriculture.

A clinic in the Yale Law School tradition

Esty said that when he came to Yale in the 1990s, there was a growing sense at law schools that legal education needed to include more practical training. Yale Law School already had a long history of giving students hands-on lawyering experience with a clinical program established in the 1970s and informally, operating even earlier. The program offered clinics covering a range of topics, but it did not yet have one dedicated to environmental issues. 

Since environmental issues require legal, technical, scientific, and policy expertise, the clinic would necessarily be interdisciplinary. The clinic was initially housed at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP), a joint organization of Yale Law School and Yale School of the Environment. Esty envisioned a clinic in which students would use a variety of lawyering tools, including policy analysis and interdisciplinary research.

“Good science, good analysis, good data, good economics, and good law,” Esty said. “All of that came together in this clinic.” 

Good science, good analysis, good data, good economics, and good law. All of that came together in this clinic.” 

—Professor Dan Esty

Safdi, who was a joint-degree student at Yale’s environment and law schools, observed the clinic’s influence in her time here.

“It's exposed many generations of students to partner organizations that work in this space, to diverse theories of change, and to creative modalities for advancing environmental protection and sustainability,” Safdi said. “And, importantly, it’s held space for environmental students at Yale Law School.”

Focus on policy

The clinic’s emphasis on policy came in part from Esty’s background, which included private practice and four years in leadership roles at the Environmental Protection Agency shortly before coming to Yale. The approach was also born of a time when policy and federal law were seen as more viable strategies for protecting the environment, Esty said. He noted that the 1990 Clean Air Act, the last major piece of environmental legislation adopted in the U.S., passed in the Senate on a vote of 89 to 11. 

“I think students coming into the environmental arena today can't believe that that degree of bipartisanship could ever have been possible,” Esty said. “So we really were working at that time in a different political climate, when it was still possible to imagine bringing people together, still possible to imagine legislation as a central way of advancing the agenda.”

Today, he said, when environmentalists have little hope of making change in Washington, work at the state and local levels is critical. But the clinic targeted different arenas early on, Esty pointed out. The clinic worked with the New Haven–based Connecticut Fund for the Environment on several projects concerning Long Island Sound, including one on the state’s shellfish industry. Students also worked internationally, providing research for the Sustainable Markets Initiative, launched by then Prince Charles of Wales. The clinic’s research helped identify ways that a commitment to sustainability could be enforced in international commerce.

A home for many issues

Josh Galperin, who led the clinic from 2013 to 2018 as its first full-time director, said many of the clinic’s projects came from students. Galperin, now associate dean of environmental law programs at Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, thought of the clinic as a place for student interests that could not be put anywhere else at Yale Law School. 

“Students would say ‘I've been working on this issue in my summer job,’ or ‘I'm a tribal member and I've noticed this thing back home. Would your clinic be able to house this?’” Galperin said. “And, usually, I was able to say yes.” 

In one example, the clinic worked with the National Congress of American Indians to create a guide for tribal communities prosecuting crimes committed on tribal lands by nonmembers. A provision of the Violence Against Women Act allows such prosecution, with federal approval, of certain crimes against women. The environmental connection was that some areas saw a spike in crime on tribal lands during the fracking boom.

In another case, the clinic invoked civil rights laws when the state hazardous waste permitting in New Mexico failed to post notices in Spanish — a framing that foretells the approach used today in Safdi’s Environmental Justice Law and Advocacy Clinic. 

The approach of drawing from different areas of law also has roots in other Yale Law School clinics. As a student, Safdi spent many semesters in the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic working on projects that brought together her overlapping interests in human rights, the environment, and sustainable development — issues that she now pursues with students in her own clinic.

Enduring partnerships

As the Environmental Protection Clinic grew, it developed ties to a prominent environmental organization founded by Yale Law School graduates: the Natural Resources Defense Council. From 2002 onward, at least one member of NRDC’s staff helped lead the clinic, alongside faculty from the Law School and the School of the Environment. 

“They’re all just luminaries in the movement,” said Doug Kysar, the clinic’s faculty director and the Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law. “We have world-class talent from, arguably, the leading environmental protection organization in the country, if not the world.”

By 2018, the clinic had forged a closer partnership with the NRDC. Together, the clinic and the organization founded the Yale/NRDC Fellowship, through which an early-stage environmental lawyer or advocate spends a year with NRDC and a second year overseeing the clinic as a co-director. 

For Kysar, the fellowship is one of the clinic’s important legacies: a launchpad for environmental leaders. Today, former fellows can be found in government, at leading environmental advocacy organizations, and at law schools and universities around the country. Kysar said that, when environmental issues make it easy to be pessimistic, former students and fellows of the clinic “give me a sense of hope whatever else reason and evidence might be telling me about the state of the planet.”

New Approaches To High-Stakes Problems

Experiential courses at Yale Law School today encompass the myriad tools lawyers now have to address environmental challenges, approaches that include advocacy, litigation, and many forms of collaboration with partners and clients. The courses also reflect a changing understanding of the causes of, and solutions to, environmental harms. 

The Law, Environment & Animals Practicum grew out of the Climate Change and Animal Agriculture Legal Initiative, known as CCAALI. Since 2021, the initiative has been exploring the potential for using legal tools to address climate harms of industrial animal agriculture. The initiative collaborates with outside partners to develop novel legal strategies to better align the food system with environmental sustainability goals, especially climate change.

Bray, LEAP’s legal director, said there is a growing recognition that our relationship with animals is at the core of today’s key environmental challenges. 

“Industrial animal agriculture is a glaring example of these connections, as it is both a massive driver of the climate crisis and of animal suffering,” Bray said. “Environmental accountability for industrial animal agriculture is long overdue, and addressing its greenhouse gas emissions is part of that.”

One CCAALI project gives an example of the kinds of issues on which students will work. The initiative recently joined partner organizations to urge Minnesota state regulators to require an in-depth review of a mega-dairy’s expansion plans. If approved, the facility would be the state's largest-ever dairy operation, housing nearly 19,000 cows. In comments submitted to the state, CCAALI and its partners warned that the project would generate significant greenhouse gas emissions that were inadequately analyzed in an earlier assessment.

“Climate and animal agriculture present particularly thorny legal and political problems,” Bray said. “Students will develop skills to pursue legal change in a highly challenging context.”

Safdi, who heads the Environmental Justice Law and Advocacy Clinic, noted that students are working at a time of change in environmental law.

“The framework of environmental and administrative law that has undergirded much of modern environmental lawyering is shifting under us, as are the compounding challenges facing communities today,” she said. 

Since launching last year, Safdi’s clinic has developed a substantial caseload that represents many of those compounding challenges, which include accelerating climate change, rapid buildout of the physical infrastructure for artificial intelligence, biodiversity loss and its accompanying threats to millennia-old cultural practices. While all of this is happening, Safdi notes, the communities most affected by these problems have fewer avenues for participating in the decisions that cause them.

“These challenges are not evenly distributed,” Safdi said. “Environmental lawyering calls for creative new approaches to address challenges of such wicked complexity.”

Environmental lawyering calls for creative new approaches to address challenges of such wicked complexity.”

—Professor Stephanie Safdi

Some of the clinic’s first cases continued work that Safdi started at Stanford, where she taught before joining Yale Law School’s faculty last year. In one project, the clinic represents community organizations suing in state and federal court to stop the expansion of California State Route 99 through South Fresno as part of a project to widen the highway through the state’s Central Valley. The highway’s construction more than 60 years ago fractured South Fresno neighborhoods, and the area has suffered from loss of housing, heavy truck traffic, and pollution there since, according to residents. The cases pursue claims under environmental statutes as well as civil rights and housing laws.

In another set of cases Safdi brought from California, the clinic represents a coalition of tribal nations whose ancestral homelands span the San Francisco Bay-Delta Watershed, as well as community organizations in Stockton. The tribes and organizations are pressing the state to restore instream flows through the Delta, the Pacific Coast’s largest estuary. Student attorneys represent their clients in water rights adjudications, regulatory proceedings, legislative advocacy, and in a civil rights investigation.

The clinic is also pursuing representations on the East Coast. In one matter that has gotten widespread press, the clinic represents residents in Lowell, Massachusetts, fighting a data center encroaching on their neighborhood. The residents won the state’s first data center moratorium this spring. The clinic recently filed a lawsuit against state regulators, which residents say worked secretly with a data center company to bypass the regulatory process. 

Closer to home, the clinic is working with a coalition of residents and nonprofits in a city adjacent to New Haven to restore a former dumping ground for industrial waste into a public amenity. Residents of Hamden are calling for the 102-acre wooded property that contains six ponds, giving rise to its informal name Six Lakes, to be remediated and turned into a park — a plan that has been discussed but has largely stalled for decades. Clinic students drafted and presented a white paper for the Six Lakes Park Coalition at a community meeting in the fall and are continuing to support the Coalition in achieving its goals.

The clinic represents clients who would otherwise be unable to retain attorneys, and students take the lead on providing high-quality legal representation. Safdi said students work in close collaboration with clients to understand the history and structures behind the problems clients bring to the clinic. They use that background to help design and implement strategies for advocacy that achieve client goals. 

“In this way, the clinic aims to empower a new generation of creative, collaborative, and reflective lawyers who can draw from an array of problem-solving approaches and substantive doctrine to help clients secure their vision of justice,” Safdi said.